Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 20 – Even though
Ramzan Kadyrov quickly backed off from suggestions by his subordinates that
Grozny will give out new “passports” to Chechen young people, something many
Russians would see as threatening, the Chechen leader wants to register the
nationality and membership in teips and wirds of every young person in his
republic.
Kadyrov may have recognized that
talking about new passports was too much for Russians – in his retreat, he said
there can only be “one passport” in the country – but he clearly believes that
sub-ethnic groups like teips and wirds are the key to controlling young people
and allowing him to block ISIS recruitment efforts.
(A “teip” is a group of people in
Chechen and Ingush societies nominally descended from a common ancestor. There
are several hundred of these in Chechnya alone. A “wird” is a group of Sufi
Muslims who are committed to certain ritual forms of worship such as the voiced
and unvoiced expression of prayer. The two often but do not always overlap and
re-enforce.)
Earlier this week, Adam Malikov, a
deputy in the Chechen parliament, posted on that institution’s official website
a declaration that Kadyrov wanted to carry out “a spiritual-moral passportizaiton”
of Chechen residents aged 14 to 35 that would include data on nationality,
teip, and wird. (grani.ru/Society/Religion/m.248799.html).
In his post, Malikov said that the
decision had been supported by the religious authoritiese and had “already
entered into force.” He added that such “passportization”
would help block ISIS and thus allow the authorities to prevent “any forms of
the manifestation of extremism and terrorism.”
A day later Malikov’s post was
removed, although Russian agencies said such an order had in fact been
given. Then, Kadyrov himself declared
that he wasn’t engaged in handing out “any ‘passport.’” “I want to remind that in our country there
is only one passport, that of a citizen of Russia! Everything else is an invention” (instagram.com/p/BB-PtfPiRmJ/).
But at the same time, he said that
it was important for the religious authorities to work with the secular ones to
gather such information so as to be able to fight terrorism and the threat of
terrorism. Kadyrov indicated that
gathering such materials was only a part of the anti-extremist effort.
On the one hand, this series of
events shows that Kadyrov does operate within some limits, at least at present;
and on the other, it highlights the continuing importance of sub-ethnic groups
in the nationalities of the Russian Federation, groups that Soviet writers
generally described as “survivals of the past” but ones that have proved longer
lasting than they.
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